Peter I's editorial policy appears as a starting point in the birth of secular Russian textbooks. Since the printing production was then organized on a massive scale as a response to the needs of European-like modernization, it should be safely suggested that nearly "all" books produced during this pioneering period focused teaching objectives. To understand how and why such an impressive cultural blossoming could occur, we must study their history as part of the broad process of the transfer of knowledge that interfered in all the domains of Russian life. As the textbooks were essentially the product of translation, the paper will explore four main points: Who were the translators? What and why did they translate? How did they proceed? What were their main problems and achievements?